I need not remind readers that the revolution in communications technology has radically altered the scope of approaches to communication in its intersection with politics and culture. A glance at a wide range of academic publications tells us that contemporary research now seeks to answer questions about the role of technology in structuring human relations and about their political manifestations, amongst other issues. Profound social changes of the last decades, including the proliferating use of social media accompanied by the rise of the mediated self, globalisation, and the increasing power of neo-liberal ideology, have precipitated changes and transformed studies of communication. One significant shift in focus that would be wholly expected in a journal dealing with contemporary issues in communication, politics and culture has been the number of submissions dealing with digital communication technologies. The articles in Volume 49, Issue 2 are all generally located in the context of technology, politics and identity.
This empirical qualitative study explores male Goths' lived experiences in rural Australia. Offline, participants felt rural communities' 'conservatism' and hegemonic masculinity norms restricted their Goth identity expression and subcultural participation. Further, their commonly perceived homosexuality, irrespective of self-identified sexuality, was believed responsible for much assault, ostracism, and 'othering' experienced in rural, but not urban, environments. To escape rural realities and engage in 'authentic' identity expression, participants vociferously interacted in online communities which, more than augmenting offline reality, created opportunities systemically impossible due to rurality and permitted subcultural participation and self-identity expression they believed reduced isolation and positively affected their mental health.
Literature on politicians' use of social media tends to concentrate on election campaigns rather than on their everyday use. In examining the construction of 'Facebook Tony Abbott' (an Australian conservative federal politician and ex-Prime Minister), this paper examines how his image uploads, with five main themes: military, heterosexual family, statesmanship, athleticism and activeness, assembled a broader political persona. These images serve to promote such mythic campaign image categories as the Ideal Leader and Popular Candidate, revealing the page's permanent political campaign focus. Thus any insight the page could provide into the everyday political life of Tony Abbott was severely limited.
This article explores the reasons behind the Chinese Communist Party's fear of digital media and outlines its effects on the Party's approach to the internet. By closely examining the heavily-contested field of digital networked media, we see that the control of the internet in China is not only based on censorship but that the Party has been experimenting for some time with a variety of unusual quasi-democratic strategies, each of them designed to go beyond the need for censorship; each of them a new Party strategy to learn from its critics and win public consent for its rule.
This article examines the relationship between prime ministerial rhetoric and the framing of national identity in contemporary election campaign speeches. Through a hybrid quantitative and qualitative textual analysis, it finds the dominant narrative of Australian national identity in the 2001 prime minister's campaign launch speech was defined by themes of endurance and stoicism. In 2007, and then in 2013, the narrative conveyed a more optimistic image of the nation, despite increasing global complexities. As such, the analysis reveals distinctive elements in the three speech acts which account for shifting ways of speaking of the nation and invoking nationhood in 21st century.
Focusing on The Expendables films, I identify the importance of discourses of professional and cultural redundancy in 'geri-action', an emergent subgenre of Hollywood action film that has revitalised the careers of ageing action stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. These redundancies, which hold long-standing significance in 1980s action film, are compounded in geri-action by advanced age and diminished physical capacity. In geri-action, the spectacle of once idealised, muscled bodies is concealed and displaced onto oversized guns, fetishised vehicles and younger action bodies. However much geri-action resists 1980s action stars' use-by dates, it ultimately admits physical and generic exhaustion.
This article explores the theoretical and methodological challenges of collecting and analysing everyday online political talk in China, and outlines our approach to defining and coding such talk. In so doing, the article is designed to encourage further research in this area, taking forward a new agenda for online deliberation (Wright, 2012a), and supporting this important area of research.
Peter Williams was an Editorial Board member (and later Advisory Board member) of Southern Review, which became Communication, Politics & Culture.Despite blindness from the late 1990s, Peter continued to teach until November 2014, and was an active researcher until his death, co-writing a book on media and the government of populations (Palgrave, forthcoming).
Election campaigners draw upon posters to represent political parties and candidates in the streets. To date, scholars have largely focused on the strategies of campaigners. This paper initially explores the ways and means of defacement by studying modified election posters in the city of Leipzig in the weeks preceding the 2013 German federal election. The results show that a large number of observed modifications are simple and obvious, while only some defacements show subtle forms of political communication. It is argued, therefore, that defacements as alternative means of political communication are of limited significance in a rather pluralistic society.
New Zealand was the first country in Oceania and the fifteenth in the world to allow same-sex marriage. This research explores whether the visual re-presentations of same-sex marriage in newspaper coverage surrounding the Parliamentary vote coalesced to form a heteronormative or homonormative 'image' of gay marriage through an examination of 654 articles about gay marriage in the mainstream, New Zealand Herald, and the alternative publication, GayNZ. This research asks whether there was a difference in that re-presentation across 'alternative' and 'mainstream'news media outlets given that visual codes of reference have been suggested to shift within an alternative communicative space.
This article examines the role of social media during the 2014 Indonesian presidential election. It analyses how candidates used Facebook and Twitter and how celebrities were enlisted to promote candidates to their fans. The coinciding development of rapid internet literacy, together with the introduction of a direct election system that appeals to identity-and celebrity-driven politics, came together to make social media a central part of Indonesian elections. This confluence has radically altered the conduct of campaigns. In order to explain this transformation, it is necessary to understand the nature of the Indonesian mediated public sphere, characterised by strong inter-media connections between social media and broadcast forms.
This paper analyses foreign news articles that appeared in three London newspapers during the Second World War, covering 'The July 20 Plot', an assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler in 1944.The analysis is supported by reading the news articles as an 'other world' myth, through which characteristics of their own nation, imagined by Britons, was observed as existing in opposition to that of the Germany portrayed. International news is thus solidified as a source of historical enquiry, as well as a site of discourse that can be examined as the expression of mythological knowledge that typifies an imagined national community.
During their Pacific war alliance, Curtin and Roosevelt expanded the national leader's use of the media to symbolise a more public persona of governance that involved citizens in crisis discussions. While the 'personalisation of politics' is a growing scholarly topic, there is a lack of research on the two leaders' use of relatively new media to evoke perceptions of their direct communications with publics during this conflict. Although they benefited from censorship, this study of their communication techniques reveals insights into how political leaders have framed media rhetoric and camera imagery to convey their administrations as increasingly inclusive public spaces.
Online activity has been shown to affect many different aspects of society including consumer perceptions of services and products. Little is known however about the effect of online activity on voting outcomes. We examine the impact of online activity on electoral outcomes, using a large phone survey of voters in the 2010 Australian federal election. We find that online activity affects voting outcomes and also whether or not a voter thinks about changing their vote. Some forms of online activity are associated with vote change while others relate to thoughts about vote change. We also find that online activity relates to the more-distant state-wide Senate vote differently from localised constituencies in the House of Representatives. Finally we establish that recalling online activity is strongly and positively correlated to vote change, establishing that findings from online activity research related to more generic services and/or products generalise across into the political domain. Given the ever-increasing level of online activity in the political sphere developing a more nuanced understanding of its effects has the potential to influence the underpinning democratic foundations of society.
